Interlude - Michel Verjux at Laure Genillard
Nothing to do. I had some leave from work to use, and used it this week, while galleries (and so many other places) remain locked down here in London. So the days have seemed blank, featureless.
I think of a plain circle of electric light, cast by a ceiling-mounted electric lamp. It’s a work by Michel Verjux, downstairs at Laure Genillard, which I viewed at an exhibition of his early last year.
Poursuite au mur, entière et frontale (source au plafond) (2019)
I always found that the works presented at this gallery were inscrutable, a bat-squeak of aesthetic achievement that’s well beyond my untrained range. Quite suitably, it’s behind a sticky door in a narrow, nothingy road behind Oxford Street. I used to go in my lunch hour, when I worked nearby, and usually left baffled.
Verjux is best-known for light works like this, which he calls éclairages. (The French word for ‘lighting’.) There and not there. And way more inscrutably austere than other artists of light that have shown in London recently, like Nam June Paik and Ann Veronica Janssens.
That austerity, and blankness, belongs to a particular moment in time. This plain, bright, uninterrupted circle on the wall, in a dingy gallery room, left me baffled then, but returns to me now. Which in turn, is a tribute to Verjux’s practice…
Michel Verjux: Lighting light well was at Laure Genillard (London). 16 February - 06 April 2019